MOJO June 2019

Phil Sutcliffe Sutcliffe first wrote about music in 1974 for Sounds and has never quite stopped. His dad Sam was a First World War Tommy, and Phil has spent recent years publishing his memoir, Nobody Of Any Importance – proceeds to the Red Cross. He writes about Bob Dylan’s Blackbushe concert on page 81. Jenny Bulley It took MOJO’s reviews editor over 30 hours to get from London to Seattle to interview Melbourne’s Amyl And The Sniffers. When she finally met them she was wired, confused, prone to outbursts of expletives. Just right, in fact. She’s only sorry she missed the ‘picking-up a coin between your butt-cheeks’ pre-stage ritual. See page 44. Bill McConkey With a career that has spanned 17 years, award-winning illustrator McConkey continues to be one of the busiest artists in UK…

REMEMBERING THE ROLLING THUNDER TOUR OF 1975 IN THIS issue, T Bone Burnett talks of the music he made with Bob Dylan and his many compadres being “as intense as rock’n’roll ever got.” It was, though, a very special kind of rock’n’roll: alive to myth, tall tales and unruly narratives; embedded in a culture of songwriting that drew on folklore, the sharing of songs, singular visions and many-handed collaboration. In time this ancient art, which Dylan had done so much to electrify and revitalise, would be codified as a genre of its own – Americana. “There’s always a balance between art and commerce, and commerce had taken over in the ’70s,” Roger McGuinn tells us. “Bob restored the art side of the balance.” Here are 14 contemporary artists who have kept that…

Gilberto Gil BRAZIL’S SWINGINGEST EX-MINISTER OF CULTURE What music are you currently grooving to? A lot of carnival stuff as carnival has just finished here in Rio. Earth, Wind & Fire and Lou Reed – both because I recently watched fantastic documentaries and was very impressed by the beauty of their music What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Chega De Saudade by João Gilberto was the birth of bossa nova and had something completely new and revolutionary on the music that was produced at that time in Brazil. João’s guitar, his way of singing, arrangements by Antonio Carlos Jobim, everything had a huge impact on me. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? Chega De Saudade – the song – in Salvador, Bahia.…

G.E. SMITH, WHO SPENT FOUR YEARS PLAYING IN BOB DYLAN’S band, has a great story about his old boss’s addiction to the road. In this month’s MOJO, Smith tells us how Dylan would talk about the Texas Troubadour, Ernest Tubb, and how he kept working, “because a musician never retires.” One Christmas Day, Dylan called Smith for a chat, and revealed his location as just outside Meridian, Mississippi. “We were on a 10-day break,” Smith remembers, “and he was just riding around in the bus, waiting for the next gig.” Three decades on, Dylan’s tour fever appears just as voracious. On Friday July 12, he returns to London to share the bill in Hyde Park with perhaps the only living American musician as gifted, bloody-minded and relentless as he is –…

“Finding these places, finding these voices, I love it.”PATTI SMITH “I’M BY MYSELF,” says Patti Smith, down the line from New York. “I’m on a deadline. I can’t really leave my work.” It’s April 2, and Smith is sequestered in her Manhattan apartment with a bad cold, taking time out to discuss her forthcoming collaboration with Soundwalk Collective’s Stephan Crasneanscki on a follow-up to 2016’s ensorcelling Killer Road. With that, the 72-year-old singer and poet reworked the lyrics and poems of Nico against the Collective’s heat-haze Ibizan field recordings and cavernous drone patterns. The new work, The Peyote Dance, focuses on Antonin Artaud’s mid-1930s travels to Mexico, where the French dramatist and poet experienced the life-changing peyote ritual of the Rarámuri people. It’s the first in a trilogy subtitled The Perfect Vision, in…

DURING THE planning stages of his Sheffield-based musical Standing At The Sky’s Edge, Richard Hawley drew a line in the sand. “One thing I said was that if it looks like the opening of the Olympics and there’s loads of people wafting scarves and shit, I’m out the fucking door.” Happily, that turned out not to be the case: the show, which ran at Sheffield’s Crucible last month, has become the most successful new musical in the theatre’s 48-year history. “It sold out completely,” says Hawley, “and not in the bad way.” The show, which features old and new songs by Hawley and a script by playwright Chris Bush, who authored 2007’s Tony! The Blair Musical, tells the story of Sheffield’s Park Hill estate: over the years, beacon of modern social housing,…